Philosophy Unit #2

Descartes' Piece of Wax

- the mind knows a piece of wax is the same physical body when it melts but it still looks completely different -he concludes that reason, without the aid of the senses, is what knows the body of wax

Theology and Falsification

-Anthony Flew -Central claim: belief in God is irrational, because claims about God are meaningless -Unless you can specify conditions that make your claim plausible, then your claims are meaningless -A version of Empiricism, very radical, ties the meaningfulness of sentences to observation, death by a thousand qualifications (qualify a claim enough and you drain it of any real meaning) -Flew is wrong because his own statement isn't subject to itself; it fails its own test; his theory of meaning fails his one condition

Subjective characteristics

-Characteristics of object only because it is seen -Everyone has a different perception

Objective characteristics

-Characteristics of object regardless of being seen -Everyone experiences something the same way

Cartesian Dream Argument

-Descartes used dreams to illustrate the fact that there are cases (it is at least possible) for sense experience to be artificially manufactured -We have artificially manufactured or maybe illusory sense experiences that are not caused by the objects that the experience is of and when that is happening we can't tell, there is nothing to distinguish the illusory experience from genuine experience -Beliefs about our environment based on sense experiences might be mistaken and perhaps shouldn't be trusted -Conclusion: we should not use sense experience as the foundation on which we build our knowledge - anti-empiricist argument

Ontological argument

-How does he escape total skepticism? How does he know anything at all? -He can doubt whether his experience is actually caused by real stuff, he can doubt whether he even has a body, so he can doubt all his senses but he can't doubt that he is doubting - we can know our own existence -Knowledge is possible as long as it is not grounded in sense experience -If there is experience, there must be an experiencer even if it is totally illusory -So this proves that the self must be different from the body because you can be certain about the self but not certain about the body -Descartes also thinks he can infer from the fact of his own existence with certainty the existence of God with certain features like one who would not deceive, a perfectly good God, meaning our experiences are not deceptive

Romantic Philosophers

-Humboldt -agreed that the mind constructs reality but does not do so according to rational structures but according to its history culture and language -one's conceptual scheme might be grounded in one's language, learning a language is learning a conceptual scheme, how to perceive the world

Impressions vs. Ideas

-Hume -distinguished by different degrees of force and vivacity -impression: all our more lively perceptions when we hear, see, feel, love, hate, desire, will -ideas are less lively perceptions of which we are conscious when we reflect on any of those sensations or movements previously mentioned -the memory of what you felt is an idea

Problem with Science

-Hume argued that when scientists observe that somtimes in the past one event caused another and conclude that this will happen every time in the future they cannot really know this conclusion is true -Kant wanted to show that despite Hume we have real knowledge of statements that are synthetic (give us info about he world) and a priori (universal statements that go beyond what our senses can perceive) in math and natural science -Kant agreed with Hume that our senses bring us a chaotic multitude of ever-changing sensations (colors, smells, sounds) but Kant argued that the mind organizes these constantly changing sensations by arranging them into objects that we experience as located in space and time; we cannot get our ideas of space and time from experience because experience presupposes space and time -space and time are structures in the mind that we use to organize our many sensations, so by reasoning about the structures of space time within us we can have real knowledge of synthetic a prior laws of math -we can't perceive anything that is not in space time

Descartes

-I think, therefore I am -the clarity and distinctness with which he apprehends this idea makes him certain about it -thus he decides that clarity and distinctness are marks of certitude, meaning we have a clear idea of something when we know exactly what it is and we have a distinct idea of something when we can readily distinguish it from other things

Phenomenalism

-Kant called the world that our minds construct and that appears to be around us the "phenomenal" world; the world as it might be in itself apart from our mind he called the "noumenal" world -but he concludes that we know our ideas can represent the world accurately because the mind itself constructs the world

Primary Qualities

-Locke -certain inherent qualities that are in the object itself whether or not anyone perceives them -can be measured mostly, like size, shape, and motion -give us an idea of the thing as it is in itself -we have copies of these through our experiences and they are reliable indicators of the world around us -subjective according to Berkeley

Tabula Rosa

-Locke comparing the mind to a blank slate on which experience makes its mark -there are no ideas which humans share, meaning no innate ideas -objection: we obviously have ideas that we do not get through senses nor from perceptions of our mental operations like the idea of gratitude, Locke says we construct these ideas from the simple ideas we get from our senses

Berkeley

-Locke is wrong to claim that the ideas of primary qualities are accurate copies of the qualities of external material bodies; since an idea can only be like another idea, our ideas of primary qualities must be copies of other ideas; since ideas can exist only in the mind, primary qualities can exist only in the mind and so are not qualities of external material bodies -we can't know here are external objects because they must cause our external sensations; we have no access to such objects, and just as dreams are not caused by external objects, our perceptions need not be caused by external objects -both primary and secondary qualities are sensations in us and so are mind dependent, thus besides minds, ideas, and sensations, nothings exists -Thinks dualism is going to result in atheism - so tries to defend faith from this -An empiricist - no experience, no ideas -Buys Locke's epistemology, but not his metaphysics -Worried about a mechanistic view of the universe -the only way to know a representation is accurate is to compare it to the original that it represents; otherwise we are just comparing representations to each other -we can't bridge the gap between the original object and our mental representation (according to Locke's own logic says Berkeley) -Basically he questions how we know primary qualities, our awareness of some primary qualities is dependent on means of the secondary qualities -There is not an external world of material objects - there is only a world of perceived objects

Locke's Theory of Perception

-Perception is built out of simple ideas of sensation -Can touch, see, hear, and taste the object -Each idea is communicated to the mind from the senses and then the mind puts it together and makes an idea of the object -The idea of the object in the mind is a subjective idea, it arises from an objective object interacting with his senses

Meno

-Plato tells us how Socrates once made a slave boy "remember" his knowledge of geometry by showing him some imperfect figures drawn on the ground -Plato tries to show that there is only one way we could have come to have our knowledge of geometry - we must have acquired this knowledge before we were born, because our souls lived in a perfect universe where we actually observed perfectly shaped lines, squares, and triangles, along with other perfect ideas

Hypothetical Method

-Whilliam Whewell -advances in science knowledge do not depend only on generalizations base on several observations but actually occur when scientists make a hypothesis about what causes or explains a phenomenon and then tests this by sense observations and experimentation -at the very heart of it then, is reason -Popper added that they must be capable of being falsified by observable events (falsifiability criterion)

Duhem Quine Problem

-a scientific hypothesis is never tested in isolation because an empirical test requires one or more background assumptions (auxiliary assumptions) (no observation derives from one hypothesis alone), any observation is always implied by a group of hypotheses, always testing sets of hypotheses -Duhem and Quine suggest this is true in any empirical reasoning, if an experiment fails, we can't know that the hypothesis we are testing is false, one of the other assumptions could be at fault

Standard Theory of Matter

-all ordinary material objects in the universe are made up of four kinds of tiny basic particles: two kinds of quarks (make up protons and neutrons), electrons, and neutrinos -held together and acted upon by strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, electromagnetism, and gravity

Skepticism

-an attitude of doubt toward what we think we know -Descartes -science kept overturning established ideas and this confused Descartes so he turned to math as a model of reasoning that leads from basic indubitable truths to new indubitable truths -he tried to doubt all his beliefs realizing that everything might be a dream or an illusion of a powerful god

Realism

-asserts that the objects in our enviro that we experience are objectively real; source of our perceptions

The Conceptual Relativist View

-based on Kuhn and coherence theory of truth -says that communities of scientists accept research methods, programs, theories, and values that form a "conceptual framework" that is true by definition -new findings or beliefs are true if they fit in with the community's conceptual framework -all observations are "theory laden"; they are influenced by our values, beliefs, and theories (conceptual framework) about what se should be seeing; so theories cannot be verified by somehow observing the real world independently of our theories as instrumentalists and realists assume; we can see only if our theories fit in with the beliefs and theories we already accept -periodically, theories are traded for another in conceptual revolution so the new framework is not more true than the old one, does not more accurately describe the world or make more accurate predictions, just better achieves whatever values are prized in the community's conceptual framework -Conceptual Relativism: different language groups will then experience different worlds, live in different worlds

Secondary Qualities

-colors, tastes, and sounds -a tree has no green color, it has only the power to produce in our senses a sensation that we call green, proved by the fact that a sensation will banish and cease as soon as our senses stop observing them or not -Locke -subjective according to Berkeley

Instrumentalist view

-emphasizes the importance of knowing whether a scientific theory "works" and that knowing whether a theory works determines whether the theory is acceptable -scientific theories that talk about unobservable theoretical entities are not true in the literal sense like saying the moon exists but they are assumed to be true to help predict what will happen -unlike pragmatic view of truth, this does not claim that scientific theories are literally true when they work; saying a theory works just means that it can accurately predict what will happen

A Priori Knowledge

-knowledge that does not depend on sense experience, but is still knowledge -knowledge that is known independently of sense perception and that is necessarily true and indubitable -like math and logic -rationalist view

Problems with Inductionism

-every generalization has to go beyond the observation on which is is based, so evidence cannot really prove the generalization -a large number of different generalizations are equally confirmed by the observations of the scientist -inductionists say that simplicity is the way you decide between competing generalizations -almost none of the great scientific theories are mere generalizations from a few facts like evolution - Darwin didn't see any species evolve

Why does God exist according to Descartes?

-he could not have produced the idea of a perfect being, God, and neither could he have acquired it through the senses -only God could have put it into his mind, so God must exist -because God is good, he does not deceive, so we can rely on the power of knowing He has given us

Berkeley's Critics

-he has no more grounds for claiming God exists outside our minds than he has for claiming that material objects exist outside the mind -because he rejects material objects he should reject God or accept both -Problem: you can say there are bodies and you can say that you have a mind, but how can you say that there are other minds - the problem of other minds, if you're a hard core empiricist, the only mind you can say exists is your own -Problem: the perceptions have to come from somewhere and how are they regular - Berkeley says that God puts the objects in your mind -Is there a world for every perceiver? Is there a shared world? Berkeley is former, Locke is latter - the shared world arises from language - strictly speaking, there are as many worlds as there are perceivers but a shared world arises when we talk to each other about our individual worlds -Berkeley's view is called idealism

Transcendental Idealism

-holds that the world that appears to be around us is a world that our mind constructs by arranging the sensations that come from the senses into whatever structures or patterns the mind itself provides

More Problems with Locke

-how do we know our perceptions/sense data accurately represent the external world? we have no direct knowledge of any external objects so we have no direct knowledge of their actual primary qualities -how do we even know there are external objects? Locke says we know stuff is out there cause something had to cause our sense

Innate Ideas

-ideas that are present in the mind from birth -we could not have acquired them by observation because our experience of the world is too limited and its objects are too imperfect -Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, Indian Jain philosophers

Problem with Locke's Empiricism

-if we know only what our sense experiences show us, then we have no way of knowing whether our sense experiences match the world beyond our sense experiences or even whether there is a world beyond our senses -Response 1: claim that no qualitative distinction exists between what I seem to experience and what things are like in reality; meaning that there is no difference between my sense experience and reality, so the universe is made of nothing more than my own sense experience -Response 2: agree that what I experience must be distinguished from reality itself; so we have to determine precisely how to know whether our sense perceptions square with reality, can we even really know this? (Locke chose this option)

Cartesian Rationalism

-knowledge is possible independent of sense experience - dream and candle arguments -we come equipped with innate ideas - like selfhood, it is innately known, and material substance/object-hood - we can know things independent of experience and there must be knowledge of the world that we have innately

Introspection

-knowledge of our own mind and thoughts (Locke)

A Posteriori Knowledge

-knowledge that depends on our experiences; it is knowledge stated empirically verifiable or falsifiable statements -empiricism -Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Charvaka, Byaya

Causality

-meaningless for Hume -idea that when one object causes another object to do something; some kind of real connection or force or power by which the cause really exerts its causality on its effect -this idea is not derived from any sense impression, so doesn't exist -it is only the habitual expectation that events in the future will be followed by the same kind of events that followed them in the past, formed by repeatedly seeing the same sequence of events -since past experiences are the only basis for thinking the future will be like the past and we can rely on past experience only if the future will be like the past, there is no noncircular way of showing that we are justified in expecting that the future will be like the past

Solipism

-only I exist and everything and everyone else is just an idea in my subjective consciousness, so what is real is whatever seems real to me in my own private world of ideas -Berkeley's ideas could've easily turned to this -he avoids this by saying that God exists and that he produces the sensations in my mind and maintains them even when I do not perceive them

Inductive Generalization

-probable argument whose premise indicates that something is true of a limited sample and whose conclusion claims that the same is true of the whole population -strength depends on the size of the sample (the larger the sample, the stronger the argument) and on how representative it is (to what extent the characteristics of the sample match the relevant characteristics of the whole population) -Humes criticism of all causality applies to these

Hume

-pushed L and B's empiricism to a thorough skepticisim -asserts that all contents of the mind can be reduced to those given by the senses and experience, called perceptions which have two forms impressions and ideas -accepted B's view that all we experience are our own sensations and ideas (impressions); if an idea is not derived from a sense impression, it is meaningless or nonexistent -because we have no access to an external world beyond our sense impressions, we have no justification for believing that any external world exists beyond our impressions and ideas -concludes that we can never know whether or not any of our ideas about the external world are accurate or even whether there is an external world -the only way you can know anything is experiences and without that, no knowledge is possible at all -If empiricism is true, science is impossible - how is a shared/objective world possible?

Methods of Induction

-rules for determining which generalizations were supported by many particular facts and observations the scientist collected 1. accumulation of particular observations 2. generalization from the particular observations 3. repeated confirmation -Mill

Kuhn's Scientific Paradigms

-science is a social activity in which a community of scientists accepts a paradigm consisting of theories and methods of discovery and proof which are periodically overturned by scientific revolutions that establish new paradigms -during scientific revolutions, older scientists try to hold on to old theories and resist new paradigms but the new paradigm is not necessarily more true than the old -problem: no way of answering whether or not a claim is real science of unscientific - only that a theory is scientific if the community of scientists accepts it

Inductionism

-science is based on inductive reasoning, reasoning that moves from many particular observations to claims about the general laws that govern what we observe - Francis Bacon -improved by John Stuart Mill

Constructivist Theories

-sometimes Kants theories are called this -they hold that reality as we know it is constructed by us; we put together the world as we know it and for each of us there is no reality apart from the reality we build -extreme ones say we cannot affirm any reality beyond this world -Kant would agree that recovered memories are valid sources of knowledge only if they are causally connected to the world we perceive around us

Sense Data

-the images or sensory impressions, the immediate contents of sensory experience that indicate the presence and nature of perceived objects -critical realists

Empiricism

-the view that knowledge can be attained only through sense experience -can't count as knowledge unless it is grounded in experience -Locke, Berkeley, Hume

Rationalism

-the view that knowledge can be obtained by relying on reason without the aid of the senses -not all knowledge of the world around us is acquired through senses, math is acquired by reasoning alone without senses but still tells us how the world works -Shankara

Implications of Kant's View

-the world we see is a world out mind constructs; the mind organizes these into interrelated objects that make up the world we perceive -causality is a part of the world as we perceive it so Hume was wrong -the world as it really is in itself is not like the world we humans experience because of the way our mind organizes stuff -Kant introduced Constructivism, but his constructivism has it that we all construct the world the same way, what gets challenged by subsequent thinkers

Critical Realism

-three factors involved in perception: 1-a perceiver, knower, conscious mind, 2-the entity or object with primary qualities, 3-the sense data which serve as a bridge between the perceiver and the object

Kant

-tried to show that as empiricists claimed our knowledge begins with the senses, but as rationalists claimed the mind is a source of knowledge of universal laws -reason also contributes something to our knowledge along with sense perceptions -when the mind organizes its sense impressions into the world we know, it inserts rational structures into this world and these structures are universal laws that the mind can know because the mind put these structures into the world -Accepts the skepticism of his predecessor Hume (if you start with empiricism, you really can't know anything, thus making science impossible) -The human mind comes furnished with certain categories which are not knowledge of the world as it really is, but simply categories that the mind uses to organize the mass of sense information that hits us into an experienceable world (not innate ideas - don't tell us about nature of reality) -2 are especially important: space and time -conceptual scheme - set of concepts we use as filters, filter experience through these -Kind of like Berkeley's view because the world is not what it seems - also idealism -The world is in your head, but it is a shared world in your head -We don't what the world in itself is like, we only know what the world we experience is like because of our mind's contribution to the experience but we all have the same concepts so it's a shared world -Can never access the "real" world - or the world away from perceptions, reality in and of itself

Realist View

-version of the correspondence theory of truth -scientific theories are literally true or false -a theory is true if the entities, properties, and relationships that it describes correspond to real entities, properties, and relationships in the world -theories are discovered not invented -allow accurate predictions because they are true, they are not true because they allow accurate predictions

Constructivism

-we construct the world that we experience because we are contributing ideas to it, the world is constructed from our conceptual scheme and reality

Problem of Induction

-what justification do we have for inferring that what was true of a sample in the past will be true of a whole population in the future? -arguing that sine inductive generalization has been successful in the past, it will be successful in the future is itself an inductive generalization and so assumes that inductive generalization is justified, which is what must be proven -Hume

Representative realism

-what we actually are aware of is a mental representation of the object, that's what we're immediately aware of and from that we infer the existence of the external/material object and its characteristics -There are some features of the mental representation that arise in the relationship between the external object and our sense awareness - not all of the features of the mental representation are actually had by the material object -primary (features of the mental representation actually had by object itself) and secondary qualities (part of what you perceive but not actually had by object itself)

Scientific Method vs. Pseudoscience

1. it is based on sense observation and rationality 2. relies on inductive method for its low-level laws 3. proceeds by formulating hypotheses that can guide research 4. that are falsifiable 5. that are widely accepted in the community of scientists 6. its theories are accurate and consistent with other accepted theories, broad, simple, fruitful

Unity of the Mind

1. the mind is a unified awareness 2. if it is to be aware of its many sensations, it must connect these sensations together into a single unified world of connected objects 3. one of the ways the mind connects its sensations into a single unified world of interrelated objects is by making all changes causally related to other changes in that world; every event we perceive must be caused by some other event 4 . these causal relationships are connections the mind must make so that it can bring a unified and independent world into its awareness 5. the world we are aware of, then, has to be a unified world in which all independent events or changes must have a cause

Personal Memory

our ability to bring into our present consciousness a representation of events that we personally and directly experienced in the past

Habit Memory

our ability to remember how to do something that we learned in the past, such as how to ride.... a bike!

Factual Memory

our memory of all the facts that make up our knowledge of the world; I personally acquired these facts but I did not personally experience them

Memory

the ability to bring facts or our past experiences into our present consciousness or activities

Perception

the processes of seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting by which we become aware of or apprehend ordinary objects such as chairs, tables, rocks, and trees